Abstract
We present a data set on the biodiversity of Italian freshwaters, including lakeshores and riverbanks of natural (N=379: springs, streams and lakes) and artificial (N=11: fountains) sites. The data set belongs partly to the Italian Long Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy) and partly to LifeWatch, the European e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research. The data included cover a time period corresponding to the last fifty years (1962-2014). They span a large number of taxa from prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes to vertebrates and plants, including taxa linked to the aquatic habitat in at least part of their life cycles (like immature stages of insects, amphibians, birds and vascular plants). The data set consists of 6463 occurrence data and distribution records for 1738 species. The complete data set is available in csv file format via the LifeWatch Service Centre.
Highlights
BACKGROUND & SCOPEMany freshwater and taxonomic data sets exist at both European and National levels, such as the Freshwater Biodiversity Data Portal - BioFresh, the National Network of Biodiversity, and Nature 2000
Information on subspecies was kept to avoid losing information that could be useful for some users
All of the records were verified by experts belonging to the different LifeWatch nodes
Summary
BACKGROUND & SCOPEMany freshwater and taxonomic data sets exist at both European and National levels, such as the Freshwater Biodiversity Data Portal - BioFresh (http://data.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/metadb/metaDBfts/index.php), the National Network of Biodiversity (http://193.206.192.106/portalino/home_it/dati.php), and Nature 2000 (http://www.minambiente.it/pagina/rete-natura-2000). Further web-links exist that are data portals to locations along the Italian peninsula where information pertaining to the distribution of freshwater biodiversity is available (e.g., Checklist of the Italian Fauna, AQEM-STAR invertebrate database, Alpine GIG lakes phytoplankton, macrophytes and macroinvertebrates data, European Trichoptera, etc.) Of all of these websites and portals, no one site combines the simultaneous presence of different taxonomic groups. We have compiled a data set that represents one of the most comprehensive and thorough collection nationwide, which is part of a larger LifeWatch data set including coastal lagoons, littoral marine waters and terrestrial habitats This vast data set was created under the umbrella of a case study on Alien Species (AS) that was proposed and coordinated by LifeWatch Italy at the European level. The utility of such a data set is widely recognized and reflected in INVASIVESNET (Lucy et al 2016) joining together with the LifeWatch and several other existing initiatives at the European level to trace, monitor and counteract
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